The Long Shot: Independent women

Earlier this week, I saw “Amour” for the second time, far removed from the hustle and fatigue of Cannes. My thoughts on the film settled on a return visit (and they’ll be gathered soon in an overdue review), but this was one of them: if Emmanuelle Riva doesn’t get a Best Actress nomination for her work here, the Academy’s entire acting branch may as well turn in their cards.

It’s not just that her performance as a refined, intelligent music teacher descending rapidly into undignified, inarticulate dementia after a sudden stroke is a marvel of thespian technique as well as emotional intuition. It’s that it’s the kind of showcase performance, with its self-evident degree of difficulty and devastating audience connection, that most Academy voters wouldn’t hesitate to recognize if it came from within their ranks: if “Amour” were an equivalently acclaimed US indie and a revered veteran like, say, Gena Rowlands were in Riva’s place, I’d wager the Best Actress race might already be over.

Yet ask many an awards pundit about Riva’s chances, and they’ll tell you the 85 year-old star will be lucky just to get the nomination – a feat, incidentally, that would make her the oldest lead acting nominee in Academy history. Subtitles remain a tricky barrier to any Oscar campaign, and Riva is in no position to do the extensive industry gladhanding generally required to surmount it.

Marion Cotillard, for one, pulled off that trick in 2007 with “La Vie en Rose.” One would like to believe that her remarkable performance as Edith Piaf, in a far ropier and less critically endorsed film than “Amour,” spoke for itself — but the actress, then widely unknown in the States, didn’t spend three months turning up at every Hollywood party, benefit and ribbon-cutting opportunity for her own health. She’ll be taking the same tack this year, of course, with “Rust and Bone”: another committed, courageous performance in a hard-sell French feature that’ll hopefully benefit from the level of transatlantic celebrity she’s attained in the last five years.

Riva’s team, on the other hand, will mostly be depending on acting branch members to watch their “Amour” screeners. If they do, they’ll be suitably dazzled. But what if they think the film sounds too much of a downer? What if they don’t remember Riva’s name from “Hiroshima, Mon Amour” over a half-century ago, and aren’t curious to see the actress in the twilight of her career? However many critics’ groups stump up for her, it’d be all too easy for many voters to overlook Riva – and indeed her younger compatriot – and gravitate instead to the more familiar comforts of Helen Mirren in “Hitchcock” or Judi Dench in “The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel.”

As such, in many ways, Best Actress strikes me as the most interestingly loaded – and most fragile – of the major Oscar categories this year. The choices it presents allow the Academy to demonstrate, however inadvertently, how adventurous or conservative a body they really are.

The potential exists for it to be one of the most rewardingly unconventional slates in memory, and not just because nominating both Frenchwomen would mark the first time since 1976 that more than one foreign-language performance has cracked a single acting field. Nominating eight-year-old discovery Quvenzhane Wallis for her ferociously unschooled turn in “Beasts of the Southern Wild” wouldn’t just make pleasingly symmetrical history – she’d be the category’s all-time youngest nominee to Riva’s oldest – but it’d represent an bold stylistic leap for the category as well.

That Jennifer Lawrence, currently the bookies’ favorite to win for “Silver Linings Playbook,” seems to occupy the aesthetic middle ground in the race says more about her unorthodox competition than her fast, frisky turn in David O. Russell’s left-of-center romcom. She may be a white-hot movie star riding a popular festival hit, but it’s the kind of lickety-split, lightly soured comic turn that rarely gets to lead the Oscar race, not least because the actress blithely disguises the difficulty of its construction. Watching it, I kept thinking it was a role Barbara Stanwyck might have played in a 1940s incarnation of the film – and we all know how many statuettes she won.

Even with Jessica Chastain’s reportedly strong work in “Zero Dark Thirty” still an unknown quantity, these are exciting performers and performances to be talking about at the top of any acting race. Yet talk persists across the blogosphere, as it does on an almost annual basis, of Best Actress being a “weak” category – a kneejerk complaint I really can’t square with this year.

That the majority of year-end, Oscar-targeted prestige titles are male-focused means, in most years, that the search for leading female contenders must extend to independent, foreign and sometimes even genre fare. If anything, this kind of deeper consideration should strengthen a category rather than the opposite: a weaker category, if you ask me, is one where the top contenders are idly creamed off from the year’s baitiest juggernauts. That’s a luxury Best Actress is rarely afforded, and whatever that says about the retrograde gender politics of Big Hollywood, it shouldn’t be a slight on the smaller vehicles and performances that benefit from this blind spot.

That said, the Best Actress category is precisely as weak as the voters allow it to be, and some years they’re more vigilant than others. For every year they take advantage of the field’s flexibility to recognize truly special work from less obvious sources, there’s another when they settle for padding out the category with inessential work from familiar names. For every Emily Watson in “Breaking the Waves” there’s an Angelina Jolie in “Changeling,” and not for lack of better options.

Two years ago, voters looked to the independent sphere and compiled a banner Best Actress slate of rich, surprising, tonally varied work in equally vital films: Natalie Portman may have cruised to a win for “Black Swan,” but it was a field that deserved to be more competitive. Last year, however, the voters backslid, forgoing risky, high-wire work from Tilda Swinton, Charlize Theron and further outliers like Olivia Colman for a field in which, excepting a faintly hip, semi-surprise nod for Rooney Mara in a frosty David Fincher thriller, only one nominee’s performance (that’d be runner-up Viola Davis) stood with her best.

It’s hard to guess, at this stage, which way the Academy will swing. They might decide they’re not in the mood for reading subtitles this year, or follow SAG’s lead of denying young Wallis the keys to the kingdom. We already know they’re unlikely to consider, or even see, such worthy contenders as Michelle Williams in “Take This Waltz,” Melissa Leo in “Francine,” Linda Cardellini in “Return,” Rachel Weisz in “The Deep Blue Sea” – or even Anna Kendrick, so instrumental to the fizzy fun of “Pitch Perfect.”

Should all of this come to pass, there is no shortage of respectable dramatic work in sure-to-be-campaigned prestige fare that voters could more easily reach for: Naomi Watts in “The Impossible,” for example, or Keira Knightley in “Anna Karenina.” Such perfectly commendable performances would nonetheless sell the category short if nominated at the expense of a Riva, a Cotillard or even a Wallis – nominations for any or all of whom could prove to the mainstream how much more resourcefully it could use its female talent. If that makes for a “weak” Best Actress year, ladies, it definitely ain’t easy being independent.

Check out my updated predictions HERE and, as always, see how Kris Tapley, Greg Ellwood and I collectively think the season will turn out at THE CONTENDERS.

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So basically, Meryl Streep will get nominated for Hope Springs, right?

By: AmericanRequiem

11.08.2012 @ 4:00 AM

well she does do great work in the film..

By: GuyLodge

11.08.2012 @ 4:03 AM

Actually, I think that’d be a well-deserved nod — her best work in ten years.

By: Clayton Davis

11.08.2012 @ 3:17 AM

Great piece Guy.

I wholeheartedly agree with you. I wrote a piece today about how and why Lionsgate has a secret weapon in Naomi Watts: [www.awardscircuit.com]

You can even go outside the typical contenders and nominate Nina Hoss in “Barbara,” a fully worthy choice of citation.

Clayton

By: GuyLodge

11.08.2012 @ 4:09 AM

Agreed — Hoss would be a fantastic choice. Ditto Emilie Dequenne in Our Children, perhaps my favourite female performance of the year, though I suspect it’ll be a 2013 release.

By: Gautam

11.08.2012 @ 3:48 AM

Guy, very interesting article but allow me to put you in spot. Let’s say you have the option of replacing one among Lawrence, Mirren, Riva, Wallis, Watts with Riva. Who would you replace ?

By: gautam

11.08.2012 @ 3:56 AM

Correction: Guy, very interesting article but allow me to put you in spot. Let’s say you have the option of replacing one among Lawrence, Mirren, Riva, Wallis, Watts with Cotillard. Who would you replace ?

By: GuyLodge

11.08.2012 @ 4:05 AM

I haven’t seen Mirren yet, so I’ll remove her from the equation and say Watts, quite easily.

By: Gautam

11.08.2012 @ 4:14 AM

Oh, so aren’t going against yourself by not removing Lawrence. Or you too have fallen into the honey trap like other oscar prognosticators. I keep hearing that Academy consists of old white males who are going to fall all over Lawrence. But I was wondering aren’t most of the oscar bloggers also the same. Ok, may be not that old but old enough to get lured rather than impressed by Lawrence performance. I have seen Silver Linings and can definitely say that she isn’t exceptional. I haven’t seen Impossible but I believe Watts would be better on all counts than Lawrence.

By: Joe

11.08.2012 @ 5:09 AM

So because you don’t like Lawrence the rest of the world must be blinded by her looks? That’s a very reductive way of seeing things.

Btw I’ve seen Lawrence, I’m a gay male, and I think her win will be great.

By: Joe

11.08.2012 @ 5:17 AM

And I don’t see how what he says is “going against himself” when the article clearly states “That Jennifer Lawrence, currently the bookies’ favorite to win for “Silver Linings Playbook,” seems to occupy the aesthetic middle ground in the race says more about her unorthodox competition than her fast, frisky turn in David O. Russell’s left-of-center romcom. She may be a white-hot movie star riding a popular festival hit, but it’s the kind of lickety-split, lightly soured comic turn that rarely gets to lead the Oscar race, not least because the actress blithely disguises the difficulty of its construction. Watching it, I kept thinking it was a role Barbara Stanwyck might have played in a 1940s incarnation of the film – and we all know how many statuettes she won. “

By: Gautam

11.08.2012 @ 5:18 AM

Where do I say, I don’t like Lawrence. I said her performance is not being judged with unbiasedness.

By: Gautam

11.08.2012 @ 5:27 AM

Well that what’s I want to know from Guy, if he also suffers from the same malaise like many others – where male fantasy has taken over right sense of judgement. I am sure he doesn’t but I know he has an opinion.

By: GuyLodge

11.08.2012 @ 2:04 PM

I’m more into Bradley Cooper, frankly. But Gautam, this is a silly and potentially offensive line of questioning to take with anyone.

So whenever a performer who somehow manages to be both — gasp — attractive and talented happens to give a strong performance, their admirers must be guided by fantasy rather than artistic judgement? How on earth does one determine this? Marion Cotillard and Naomi Watts aren’t exactly hard to look at either — are their advocates similarly blinded? And why is it just “old white males” liable to be led in this way?

Projected desire is certainly an integral part of the cinematic experience, Gautam, and that’s nothing anybody should be ashamed of — but if physical response was as overridingly persuasive as you make it out to be within the straight-male-dominated spheres of critics and Academy voters alike, Megan Fox would have as many Oscars as Kate Hepburn by now. Think carefully before making such presumptuous leaps in logic, and remember that your pronouncement that there “definitely” isn’t anything exceptional about Lawrence’s performance carries no more weight than my opposing opinion. It sounds awfully like you’re assuming an authority that allows you to declare any dissenters “biased” or even affected by “malaise,” and no one is in any position to do that.

Sorry if this sounds like a lecture, but I find such comments irresponsible and unproductive, and I’m sure you’re smarter than that.

By: Liz

11.08.2012 @ 3:49 PM

“I haven’t seen Impossible but I believe Watts would be better on all counts than Lawrence.”

Seriously? You don’t find it at all silly that you’re stumping for a performance you haven’t seen? And yet you’re criticizing others for favoring Jennifer Lawrence, saying they’re not taking her performance into account?

By: Gautam

11.08.2012 @ 4:13 PM

Guy, You made the whole issue a lot simpler than what the completexity of this problem is. World is not black or white. So, when I say Lawrence is attractive that doesn’t by any count mean she isn’t a good actress. [By the way that’s what your Megan Fox example was directed at]. And if you read carefully I have not even said that Lawrence is not good in the film or she is not talented, I have just said she isn’t exceptional in the film. And I am sorry if it sounded like an authority but it was just an opinion and since you are into the business of giving opinions I hope you understand that when I write words like “malaise” or “biased”, it’s just what I felt. And I still feel the same, and I have strong reasons of feeling so, let me reverse the question and put it this way, if the character enacted by Jennifer Lawrence, was played by someone completely unattractive or made so, do you think she would have recieved the same buzz that Lawrence is receiving. Think deep. You will have the answer and also the place from where I am coming from.

By: Gautam

11.08.2012 @ 4:17 PM

Liz, It’s simple, because Lawrence doesn’t set very high or unachieveable standards of acting in the film, which I believe an actress like Naomi Watts reaches or crosses in every film of hers.

By: Liz

11.08.2012 @ 4:23 PM

“You made the whole issue a lot simpler than what the completexity of this problem is.”

No, you’re the one doing that with your whole “only because she’s hot theory.” To you, it’s just not possible that people disagree with your opinion and think she really is exceptional in the role.

“if the character enacted by Jennifer Lawrence, was played by someone completely unattractive or made so, do you think she would have recieved the same buzz that Lawrence is receiving. Think deep. You will have the answer”

Ah, so the answer is “yes.” Good, then we’re all in agreement.

You do realize that Jennifer Lawrence is already an Oscar-nominated actress, right? She’s not some random hottie that they’re just gloaming onto now. They’ve already proved that they like her. And she was nominated for a role in which she was very plain and not at all attractive, so that blows your “only because she’s hot” theory away.

And I don’t understand why you’re holding Naomi Watts up instead (and for a movie YOU HAVEN’T SEEN). She is also a very beautiful woman. Or doesn’t that matter in this case?

I don’t think you realize how insulting your argument is and how you’re completely devaluing these artists’ work (including Watts) by pushing these random theories. You’re going to just look worse and worse by ignoring performances and preferring to talk about how they look rather than how they act.

By: Gautam

11.08.2012 @ 4:40 PM

Liz, It seems the limitations of writing comment are raising its ugly head. Since I can’t explain myself enough you are assuming things which I haven’t even said. First of all, I have no issues with Lawrence. Let’s make it clear and obviously you think I have something against her. She is a good actress. Period.
Secondly I have said that people are misguided by Lawrence attractiveness in the film. That means the character which she potrays is attractive and male fantasy [Again here I would like to explain myself more but that means I would need 1000 words]. Hence, yours or Guys logic of Watts/Cottilard are also attractive doesn’t hold good because they are unattractive in the film. The issue is as soon as someone has an opinion which is against the common logic people are ready to jump on their guns. Again, I am not against Lawrence. “I am for the belief that you shouldn’t let your judgement get affected by your fantasies which is what’s happening with Lawrence in SLP.” My last statement is my only opinion. Everything else, has been assumed either because of the limitations of this medium or my going against a commonly held belief.

By: Gautam

11.08.2012 @ 4:49 PM

And Liz, if the world was guided only by acting and not by appearances, Riva would win the Oscar. But sadly, it isn’t so. That in itself proves my point. And yes, if you can stop yourself from hating me,and read carefully you will realize I am more advocator of acting than looks.

By: Liz

11.08.2012 @ 5:15 PM

“And Liz, if the world was guided only by acting and not by appearances, Riva would win the Oscar.”

Again, that’s your opinion, and you assuming that there are ulterior motives in people simply having a different opinion than you is, as Guy said, irresponsible and unproductive. Why is it that sometimes what you say is your opinion, while other times, it’s the ironclad truth? If someone disagrees with you (after having seen the performances, which you yourself don’t think is necessary, apparently), that doesn’t mean that they’re idiot zombies who are being swayed by the hypnotic powers of an attractive woman. They just prefer another performance. It’s really weird how you don’t seem to think that’s possible.

And knock it off with the persecution complex. “Waaaah, I disagree with someone else, now everyone hates me!” Grow up.

By: GAUTAM

11.08.2012 @ 5:48 PM

I am laughing at your so many assumptions. And it’s so evident that either you don’t understand what I am trying to say or don’t want to.
“Why is it that sometimes what you say is your opinion, while other times, it’s the ironclad truth?” Where did I say it’s an ironclad truth, I am just voicing an opinion. It’s you that are having problems with an opinion. It’s in your head that I am trying to portray as an iron-clad truth.
You or Guy is very welcome to disagree with me and I too have every right to do so.

And seriously, instead of personal attacks like telling me to grow up, you should learn how to debate. And how convenient, for you to advise me “that’s your opinion, and you assuming that there are ulterior motives in people simply having a different opinion than you is” when you yourself are doing exactly the same by not allowing me to voice mine.

Again, I can only suggest, that you read all my comments again instead of having a personal grudge against me for not liking Lawrence in SLP. I have not been against anybody I am against a belief.

By: d2

11.08.2012 @ 4:48 AM

I just can’t help but feel that Marion Cotillard, Naomi Watts and Keira Knightley are one-hit-wonder nominees…

By: Joe

11.08.2012 @ 5:17 AM

Wait… How is Cotillard, who’s won before & is clearly in the running again, a one hit wonder nominee?

By: Jonnybon

11.08.2012 @ 10:09 AM

Cotillard is one of the greatest living actors/actresses.

By: lazarus

11.08.2012 @ 7:18 AM

I know she won’t be able to compete with all these heavy hitters, but Suzanne Clément’s work in Xavier Dolan’s Laurence Anyways is one of the best perfs I’ve seen in years, and it would be nice to see her get some more ink.

By: GuyLodge

11.08.2012 @ 2:08 PM

Yeah, she’s terrific in that. Props to the Un Certain Regard jury at Cannes for handing honours to Clement and Emilie Dequenne, particularly when acting awards aren’t usually part of their brief. They did considerably better than the Competition jury in that area.

By: bef

11.08.2012 @ 5:41 PM

Agreed. Great performance.

By: joseph

11.08.2012 @ 2:59 PM

Agree Riva should win and her, Cotillard, Wallis and Lawrence should be four locks with everyone else fighting over the fifth spot.

By: MaryMay

11.08.2012 @ 3:30 PM

Keira Knightley’s work in Anna Karenina is fearless, challenging and a true star turn. Second best performance of the year after Riva. Quite insulting to relegate her to a blurb. We all know you hate her, so you were better off not including her in your biased piece of work.

By: GuyLodge

11.08.2012 @ 3:46 PM

You may all know this, but it’s news to me, so thanks for keeping me updated. It’s a shame I apparently hate her, since she’s one of my favourite ever interviewees.

This might be the first time, but I agree with you 100% on this topic. It’s surprising how the Academy members are allergic to subtitles. A great actress transcends the language barrier and you can feel her emotions directly. The ironic thing is, Watts and Knightley might not even be nominated because their films aren’t seem to be campaigning very hard by their companies.

By: Joe7827

11.08.2012 @ 7:16 PM

Wonderful article, Guy. Your last few Long Shots have been good reads. One minor quibble, though: for an article that rightfully calls attention to little-seen and foreign performances, I think that it would’ve been more appropriate to lead off with a picture of Emmanuelle Riva (or one of the other lesser-known contenders) instead.

By: GuyLodge

11.08.2012 @ 7:22 PM

Fair point about Riva — though Cotillard’s is indeed a relatively little-seen, foreign-language performance, even if she is a more widely known name.

By: Murtada

11.08.2012 @ 8:07 PM

best Oscar article I read in a while. Agree with you that we always hear complaints about best actress when there is bountiful great everywhere. A few that I liked this in addition to what you mentioned : Melanie Lynskey in Hello I Must Be Going, Emyatzy Corinealdi in Middle of Nowhere and Kirsten Dunst in Bachelorette.

My favourite – and one that remains vivid after seeing the movie a month ago – remains Riva in Amour. The movie is a gift for anyone who loves great n.

By: GuyLodge

11.08.2012 @ 8:35 PM

Looking forward to seeing all three of those performances you mention — sadly, none has travelled to the UK yet.